Introduction to Special Section: “Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements”

Abstract

Anthropological examinations of the historical genealogies and lived experiences of race have long contested the popularly perceived immutability of race categories. Anthropologists recognize race and racism's simultaneous structural and dynamic dimensions, while increasingly attempting to move beyond the New World bias and black/white racial matrix dominant in Anglo-American studies and social constructions of race (Baker 2010; Harrison 1995; Mullings 2005; Omi and Winant 1986; Patterson and Spencer 1994; Smedley 1993; Thomas and Clarke 2013). In recent years, anthropological and critical engagements with race have highlighted the complex and power-laden (re)articulations and dynamics of racialization processes, new subject formations, and the politics of difference in a globalizing, neoliberal, postcolonial, and increasingly urban world (Appiah 1992; Besteman 1999; Bonilla-Silva 2014; Chakrabarty 2000; Dávila 2008; De la Cadena 2003; Gilroy 1993; Goldberg 2009; Goldberg and Quayson 2001; Hart 2001; Moore, Kosek, and Pandian 2003; Stoler 2011). Nevertheless, anthropological scholarship has simultaneously been afflicted by what Leith Mullings (2005, 669) characterizes as “race ambivalence”; there is consensus that race is a socially constructed category, but racism as a social reality has largely been taken for granted and under-theorized. there is consensus that race is a socially constructed category, but racism as a social reality has largely been taken for granted and under-theorized This collection of articles, originating from a session at the 2012 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, represents critical anthropological examinations of the ways racialized subjects, categorizations, and ideologies are mobilized and translated across borders. We approach mobilization in a broad sense, as a set of discursive or ideological formulations, as a form of cultural or social movement politics, and as the mobility and agency of embodied subjects. Similarly, translations occur on or through a number of fields, including the mass media and culture industries, sociolinguistic registers, social movement strategies, racial politics, and local/global governance regimes. Borders, finally, are broadly conceived as encompassing demographic, linguistic, geopolitical, market, historical, racial/ethnic, urban, and national lines and spaces. Our approach to race and racism emphasizes an understanding of the “fluidity, mutability, and historical contingency” of these categories and processes (Mullings 2005, 674), while situating them as fundamentally relational and transnational in character (Thomas and Clarke 2013). The papers in this collection cover a broad thematic range and are truly global in scope. Our case studies are bookended with the quintessential “racial states” of the United States and South Africa, and include analyses of race, racism, and racializing processes in North and South America, southern Africa, postcolonial Western Europe, post-socialist Eastern Europe, and “fast capitalist” East Asia. Tina Lee examines the racialization of urban African Americans through the New York City child welfare system, embedded within the long arm of the neoliberal and racial state. Mostly African American case workers reproduce racialized, gendered, and sexualized tropes of black mothers in a context in which urban African American youth are subjected to the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” and the medicalization and criminalization of “dysfunctional” children. Shanshan Lan presents a fascinating study of the pluralization and shifting racial meanings of “blackness” in Guangzhou, China. She examines how the so-called “Chocolate City's” African diaspora population becomes entangled within a new geopolitical triangulation between China, Africa, and the West, creating a distinctive “racism with Chinese characteristics.” Daniel Renfrew and Genesis Snyder draw from a recent high-profile English football race controversy involving two world football stars, Uruguayan Luis Suárez and Frenchman of Senegalese descent Patrice Evra, to analyze the shifting racial politics of sports and nationalism in cosmopolitan Europe and in an Uruguay undergoing new processes of racialization. They examine the varying and changing meanings of race and the problematic nature of cultural and linguistic translation of race categories in globalized and postcolonial contexts, and they analyze the organized Afro-Uruguayan community's efforts to denounce Uruguay's enduring “sly racism” and to promote racial inclusion. Laada Bilaniuk addresses the emergence and politics of race in post-Soviet Ukraine. In the context of a complex nation-building project, Ukrainians simultaneously embrace and commodify African immigrants and Afro-descended citizens as a symbol of closeness to the “new Europe” while mitigating highly mass mediated forms of xenophobia and racist reaction that fuel Western European moralizing discourses and presumptions of Ukraine's distance from “modern” and progressive Europe. The collection concludes with Joy Owen's evocative and lyrical analysis of the intended and unintended subversion of legislated racial categories in post-apartheid South Africa. Through the vantage point of the intimate relationships and politics of desire (or “xenophilia”) of South African women and black Congolese men, Owen unravels the living legacies of the apartheid past and identifies a space of hope that may signal transcendence within one of the world's most trenchant racial states. This special section contributes to four emergent or under-theorized areas in the anthropological study of race: 1) the social life of racism and racialization; 2) race and globalization; 3) the articulations of race, ethnicity, and nation; and 4) racialization and the city. First, we approach racism as a lived experience and social practice, examined in relation to processes of racialization, or the “social, economic, and political process of transforming populations into races and creating racial meanings” (Mullings 2005, 674). Several authors (Lan, Lee, Owen, and Renfrew and Snyder) explore both institutionalized forms of racism and the “psychic life of race” (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 316) in everyday situations and in relation to racialization processes. Second, our collection explores the racialized dynamics and consequences of globalization. These are expressed through reorganized labor migrations and capital mobility (Lan, Owen, and Renfrew and Snyder), the national and transnational extensions and power of the media, entertainment, and communications industries (Bilaniuk, Renfrew and Snyder), and “racialized demographic anxieties” (Mullings 2005, 675) in postcolonial (Renfrew and Snyder), post-socialist (Bilaniuk), post-apartheid (Owen), diaspora (Lan), fast capitalist (Lan), and neoliberal (Lee) contexts. Third, and overlapping with the first two areas, all of our contributors in one way or another examine the complex and sometimes contradictory articulations of race, ethnicity, and/or nation, highlighting new rights claims and the “creative reclassifications of belonging” that characterize the contemporary world (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 318). Finally, cities form the backdrop and setting of all of the contributions in this issue. As Brett Williams (2014) has argued, cities are at once celebrated spaces of multiculturalism and ethnic and racial diversity, and locations for concentrating processes of socio-spatial dispossession, criminalization, and environmental racism (see also Besteman 2008; Checker 2005; Gregory 1999; Perez 2004). Cities, as our contributors demonstrate, serve as magnets for rural-to-urban and transnational migration, engines of labor precarity and informality, sites of hyper-commodification, and concentrators of economic capital and institutional power that exacerbate existing racial disparities and facilitate new processes of racialization. Together, the articles in this collection address the ways racial mobilizations either rework and entrench, or destabilize and blur, existing racial formations and boundaries in urban, cosmopolitan, and globalized contexts. race remains elusive and enigmatic as a social concept We hope to demonstrate how race is inflected by and can be “read” into some of the most salient processes and dimensions of the contemporary world, including immigration, nationalism, consumerism, and neoliberal governance. At the same time, race remains elusive and enigmatic as a social concept. As Cox and Davis write (2012, 103), “race is, at turns, made transparent, invisible, monumentally significant, and immaterial.” Furthermore, to echo Mullings (2005, 682), this special section examines the dynamic tensions in how race and racialization are experienced simultaneously from above and from below: “the imposition of race inevitably creates the structural context for producing oppositional sites of resistance as well as creative spaces for the articulation of subaltern consciousness, culture, and opposition. Race thus potentially becomes a space for resistance and counter-narrative.” This collection, then, explores how mobilizing race categories become central to old and novel strategies of domination and logics of governance, while also serving as potential sites of transgression and agency. It examines how race categories and concepts “travel” and become translated historically and cross-culturally, expressed and negotiated within urban spaces and along global North-South, South-North, North-North, and South-South axes. Finally, it analyses the intersections between race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and national identity that destabilize normative and historically established categories of race, while creating openings for novel and renewed projects of social justice, belonging, and inclusion. Acknowledgements. The authors would like to thank former City & Society editor Suzanne Scheld for accepting this special section proposal. We are deeply appreciative of current editors Joshua Barker and Sheri Gibbings for their guidance and support in seeing it through. Finally, we'd like to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped improve our paper in this collection and those of all of the contributors.